Chapter IX (10)

In this Garden of Eden, however, all sorts of anomalous things seem to have been done by birds. In a cleft branch of a fir tree, twenty-four feet from the ground, a peahen built her nest, through which piece of ambition, since falling is much easier to learn than flying, she lost all her young ones. In the branch of an oak, twelve feet from the ground, a wild-duck nested and brought down all her brood in safety to their natural element. A pair of coots built their nest on the extreme end of a willow-branch closely overhanging the water; but the weight of the materials, and especially of the birds themselves, depressed it so that their habitation rested on the very surface of the water, and its contents rose and fell with every ripple; and, finally, another pair of coots, who had built their house upon what they considered _terra firma_, found themselves altogether adrift one stormy morning, and continued so, veering with the fickle breeze for many days, until at last the eggs were hatched, and their young family became independent, and could shift for themselves. All these minutiae were carefully watched by the squire. An excellent telescope enabled him to perceive from his drawing-room window the manoeuvres of both land and water fowls. "You could carefully scrutinize their form, their color, their plumage, the color of their legs, the precise form and hue of their mandibles, and not unfrequently even the color of the iris of the eye: also their mode of walking, of swimming, and of resting. You could distinctly ascertain the various kinds of food on which they lived and fed their young. .... You could see the herons, the water-hens, the coots, the Egyptian and the Canada geese, the carrion crows, the ringdoves (occasionally on their nests), the wild-duck, teal, and widgeon." No less than eighty-nine descriptions of land-bird and thirty of water-fowl sojourned in the grounds or about the lake of Walton Hall. In winter, when the lake was frozen, it was literally a fact that the ice could sometimes not be discerned, it was so crowded by the thousands of water-fowl that huddled together upon it without sound or motion.

Mr. Waterton, it may be easily imagined, was himself no sportsman; but it was his custom to supply his own table on a fast-day (he was a Roman Catholic) with fish shot by himself with a bow and arrow. Otherwise, he made war on no living creature, except the rat: the "Hanoverian" rat, as he designated him with bitterness: and even him he preferred to exile rather than destroy. But having caught a fine specimen of the "Hanoverian" in a "harmless trap," he carefully smeared him over with tar, and let him depart. This astonished and highly scented animal immediately scoured all the rat-passages, and thus impregnated them with the odor of all others most offensive to his brethren, who fled by hundreds in the night across the narrow portion of the lake, and were no more seen. The squire was indeed a most tolerant and tender-hearted man. He built a shelter upon a certain part of the lake expressly for poor folks, who were permitted to fish whether for purposes of sale or for their own dinners; and notwithstanding that it was his custom to dress like a miser and a scarecrow, and to live like an ascetic--sleeping upon bare boards with a hollowed piece of wood for a pillow, and fasting much longer than was good for him--he was very charitable and open-handed to others.

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It must be confessed, however, we gather from this volume that the great naturalist was, out of his profession, by no means a wise man, and certainly not a witty one. He loved jokes of a schoolboy sort, and indulged in sarcasms more practical than theoretical. The two knockers of his front-door were cast, from bell-metal, in the similitude of human faces, the one representing mirth, and the other misery. The former was immovably fixed to the door, and seemed to grin with delight at your fruitless efforts to raise it; the latter appeared to suffer agonies from the blows you inflicted on it. In the vestibule was a singularly conceived model of a nightmare, with a human face, grinning and showing the tusks of a wild boar, the hands of a man, Satanic horns, elephant's ears, bat's wings, one cloven foot, one eagle's talon, and with the tail of a serpent; beneath it was the following motto:

"Assidens praecordiis
Pavore soinnos auferam." [Footnote 45]

[Footnote 45: Sitting on the region of the heart,
I take away sleep by fear.]

It was his humor, more than once, when between seventy and eighty years of age, to welcome the author, when he came to dinner, by hiding on all-fours under the hall-table, and pretending to be a doll. He made use of his wonderful taxidermic talents to represent many individuals who took a leading part in the Reformation by loathsome objects from the animal and vegetable creation, and completed the artistic group with a sprinkling of "composite" demons. He was seriously vexed at a stranger under his own roof, who had profanely designated his favorite (stuffed) Bahia toad as "an ugly brute." These and similar instances of bad taste we think Dr. Hobson might have left unrecorded with advantage. Still, there was much to like as well as to admire about the great naturalist. He could show good taste as well as bad. No museum of natural history elsewhere could compare with the beauty and finish of the specimens, prepared by the squire's own hand with wonderful skill and patience, which adorned the inside of Walton Hall. "Not even _living_ nature," says our author, "could surpass the representations there displayed." In attitude, you had life itself; in plumage, the lustrous beauty that death could not dim; "in anatomy, every local prominence, every depression, every curve, nay, the slightest elevation or depression of each feather." The great staircase glowed with tropic splendor. At the top of it was the veritable cayman mentioned in the Wanderings, on which the squire mounted in Essequibo, and a huge snake with which he contended in single combat. Doubts have been thrown on both these feats, but Dr. Hobson relates instances of presence of mind and courage shown by the squire in his own presence quite as marvellous as these. Wishing to make experiment as to whether his Woorali poison, obtained in 1812 from the Macoushi Indians, was more efficacious than the bite of the rattlesnake, he got an American showman to bring him twenty-four of these dangerous reptiles, and took them out of their cases, one by one, with his own hand, while the Yankee fled from the room in terror, accompanied by very many members of the faculty, who had assembled to witness the operation. In his old age, he alone could be found to enter the cage of the Borneo orangoutang at the Zoological Gardens, in order minutely to inspect the palm of its hand during life, and also the teeth. It was with difficulty he obtained permission to run this hazard, the keepers insisting upon it that the beast would "make very short work of him." However, nothing daunted, the squire entered the palisaded enclosure. {193} "The meeting of these two celebrities was clearly a case of love at first sight, as the strangers embraced most affectionately, kissing one another many times, to the great amusement of the spectators. The squire's investigations were freely permitted, and his fingers allowed to enter his jaws; his apeship then claimed a similar privilege, which was as courteously granted; after which the orang-outang began an elaborate _search_ of the squire's head."

The strength and activity of Waterton were equal to his physical courage, notwithstanding that he was wont to indulge in venesection to a dangerous extent, always performing that operation himself, even to the subsequent bandaging. At eighty-one, the suppleness of his limbs was marvellous; and at seventy-seven years of age our author was witness to his scratching the back part of his head with the toe of his right foot! Death, however, claimed his rights at last in the squire's eighty-third year.

Charles Waterton lies buried in a secluded part of his own beautiful domain, at the foot of a little cross, with this inscription, written by himself:

Orate
Pro anima Caroll Waterton,
Viatoris:
Cujus jam fessa
Juxta hanc crucem
Hic sepelluntur ossa.

Even those iron limbs of his, it seems, grew weary at last.

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Original.

My Tears in Sleep.

"And He said: Weep not; the maid is not dead, but sleepeth."

"Whence come these tears upon thy face?
What sorrow craved these scalding drops of woe
In peaceful sleep?
Didst dream of pain or dire disgrace?
Sob not so bitterly. I fain would know
What made thee weep!"

"Not for the woes which life may bring--
The life, in sooth, that doth just now begin--
These tears were shed.
But memory hath a bitter sting,
And dreaming bade me mourn the time of sin
When I was dead."

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Translated from the French.

Robert; or, The Influence of a Good Mother.